Ashok Leyland’s cost-cutting initiatives yield Rs 1.67 crore

Chennai: The slowdown is creating opportunity for companies and employees to do things differently, especially when it comes to cost-cutting.
Ashok Leyland said on Thursday that it gained Rs 1.67 crore from its Ennore manufacturing facility as one-time savings based on a few cost-saving initiatives taken up by the company.
Mr K Sridharan Balaji, General Manager (Manufacturing) Ennore Plant of the company, said in October the manufacturing unit of the company identified about 1,600 projects to save cost and about 780 of them have begun yielding results.
In addition to one-time saving of Rs 1.67 crore, these projects will conserve Rs 90 lakh each year as recurring savings, including Rs 40 lakh from three projects — interconnecting cooling towers, endogas chambers and gear machining process. The benefits of other projects will be realised soon, he said.
The facility that was commissioned 61 years ago can manufacture 40,500 chassis, 50,000 engines, 75,900 rear axles and 72,000 front axles. Due to the slowdown, the unit worked for only 12 days a month between November and February.
Even then the employees could not work fully as the demand for vehicles was low.
The workforce capitalised the spare time and identified cost-saving projects.
These projects will be implemented soon at other manufacturing facilities of Ashok Leyland.
Beyond shop floor, this unit also worked on converting non-moving aggregates and components into saleable units and saved Rs 7 crore.
Besides, it also converted about 1,300 units of piled up vehicle inventory into saleable units by carrying out some modifications.
It is working on value stream mapping to determine and work with defined inventory for every component. This will help to reduce the total inventory from 16 day to 11 days.
As part of its initiative the unit is planning to introduce maintenance audit system to help enhance machine availability time and eliminate breakdowns.